Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

Over the last thirty years, the federal and state governments have increasingly tapped their powers to incarcerate people accused of violating immigration laws. As a result, almost 400,000 people annually now spend some time locked up pending the result of a civil or criminal immigration proceeding.

García Hernández explores the impact of immigration imprisonment in the mid-1980s, with enforcement resources deployed disproportionately against Latinos, and he looks at both the outsized presence of private prisons and how those on the political right continue, disingenuously, to link immigration imprisonment with national security risks and threats to the rule of law. Migrating to Prison is an urgent call for the abolition of immigration prisons and a radical reimagining of the United States: who belongs and on what criteria is that determination made?

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández is an associate professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and a frequent commentator in national and international media.

Sponsored by the UF Mellon Intersections Group on Mass Incarceration.

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